Glen Keane
is a bona-fide Disney Legend — seriously, he officially earned
the title back in 2013. In his thirty-five-some-odd years at
Disney, Keane was the lead animator for enduring characters like
Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Beast, from Beauty and the Beast,
and Aladdin, from Aladdin.

Most recently, he animated both characters from the award-winning
Disney short Paperman before leaving Disney in 2013.

"When I left Disney, I left with a sense that there has to be
something more," Keane says. "I just want to live without
walls."

At last year's Google I/O event, Dugan and her team unveiled
Google Spotlight Stories, a super-cool mobile app that shows
you a 360-degree, totally immersive movie where you can look
around each scene just by moving your phone around. Duet, a short
cartoon directed and animated by Keane, launched with the app.

At this this week's Google I/O 2015, Google ATAP released its
first live action short film, a creature feature directed by The
Fast and the Furious director Justin Lin called "Help!"

The form presents a lot of challenges for seasoned directors, who
are used to picking and choosing their shots down to the last
specific detail. In Google Spotlight Stories, a viewer can look
anywhere in every scene, any time they want. It's a tremendous
loss of power for detail-oriented directors.

"I'm sharing that power with the viewer," Lin said on a panel of
Google Spotlight Stories creators at Google I/O on Friday.

A director can't have so much as a floodlight or trailer or
extras hanging out off screen, because there is no
off-screen.

It's a frustration that Keane sympathizes with, and it presented
a big challenge when he was working on Duet, he says. Early on in
production, Keane was planning to "rely on [his] animation and
[his] drawing skills" to tell the story, treating it like any
other film he's worked on.

But his son Max Keane, Duet's production designer, urged him to
work out every single shot beforehand just to make sure that
every scene worked in three dimensions. "I was sort of like
sweating blood," Keane says, but it paid off in a more cohesive,
three-dimensional film.

The payoff, Keane says, is a more emotional film. Because a
viewer is literally placed into the middle of the scene, there's
"an immediate touching of the audience." It gets the idea and the
feeling that an artist wants to convey through to the viewer much
more quickly, making it kind of a "visual poem," he says.

Even better is that it works on mobile devices, Keane says. Not
everybody can go to a movie theater, Keane says, but more and
more people the world over are getting online with smartphones
and tablets. And since Google Spotlight Stories is ideal for
short films, it requires a smaller time investment.

Lin refers to Google Spotlight Stories as "an intersection of art
and commerce."

For Keane, who's working on more Google Spotlight Stories
projects, it's giving his work a broader audience, and the tools
to tell more interesting stories.